HUMANITAS: NEW VOLUME
THE NEW BOOK OF THE HUMANITAS COLLECTION BY BRUNO MENDES DA SILVA IS ALREADY AVAILABLE
Comunicação audiovisual: o comboio do amor [Audiovisual communication: the love train] is the new book that integrates CIAC’s Humanitas Collection, written by Bruno Mendes da Silva, the Center’s Vice-coordinator. Through the analysis of some specific moments in the history of cinema, this work explores the most relevant concepts of audiovisual language.
Available at Grácio Editor’s online bookstore and aimed primarily at higher education students in the areas of Communication, Culture and Arts, Comunicação audiovisual: o comboio do amor brings together a glossary of audiovisual grammatical elements that are essential to understanding film discourse. The predominance of audiovisual language in contemporary communication is unavoidable and, therefore, its conceptual, aesthetic, formal and technical mastery becomes imperative.
Television, video games, Youtube contents, online metaverses, or virtual reality, have in common a morphological and syntactic base that was born and grew up with cinema. In this work, we try to account for this birth and the cementation of a language that quickly became universal. For this, we resort to a metaphor: the love train, that invention that preceded cinema, but is equally swift in winning over fans and is so present on the big screen. In fact, the passengers on the train anticipated the experience of seeing moving images that cinema brought by looking out the window. The mutual influence between cinema and train, two machines with the essence of the idea of movement, follows the reader in the book, on a journey through the history of cinema to study audiovisual language.
The Humanitas Collection, currently directed by Mirian Tavares and Susana Costa, is an essay collection that disseminates the results of research produced at CIAC. It aims to offer, through the published works, a contribution to the scientific field of the Humanities.
Bruno Mendes da Silva is Coordinator of Communication Sciences at UAlg’s Escola Superior de Educação e Comunicação, where he has been teaching Audiovisual Communication since 2000. He is Vice-coordinator of CIAC, Visiting Professor at Saint Joseph University of Macao and Director of Rotura – Journal of Communication, Culture and Arts. He has participated in different scientific projects (as responsible researcher or research member) and is the author of several books, book chapters and other scientific publications. He has dedicated the last decade to the investigation of the relations between Communication, Art and Technology, with special theoretical and practical emphasis in the area of interactive film.
